Annual Report 2022/Story: Wikipedia for all of Sweden is starting!
In this story, we focus on how we're launching the project Wikipedia for the whole of Sweden, which will lay the foundation for Wikimedia Sverige to grow into an organization with increased visibility and local activities all over the country. The project is financed by the Postal Code Foundation and has focus on testing activities in four counties: Västerbotten, Uppsala, Östergötland and Skåne. We also want to expand the community that is involved in our work, which is why we're putting some extra focus on the following target groups: older people, younger people and non-men.
In the second half of 2022, Wikimedia Sverige launched our big project aimed at inspiring long-term volunteer-driven engagement across the country: Wikipedia for all of Sweden (the application can be read here). In order to focus our work, we decided to start scaling up our operations in four counties: Västerbotten, Uppsala, Östergötland and Skåne. We believe that building sustainable relationships, developing ideas for activities and gaining increased visibility is much easier if we do not start all over the country at the same time. By working in four counties, we can also compare the experiences and identify differences and similarities, which will make it easier to scale up our work to the entirety of the country in the future. In the project we're focusing on three main target groups: older people, younger people and non-men. The goal of our project and our work is to get more people to get involved in Wikimedia Sverige and the Wikimedia platforms, so that more quality content with diverse perspectives can be created.
Cooperation and partnerships with many different types of other organizations are a foundation of this project. We believe that collaborations are the key to reaching our target groups and getting in touch with people who are already involved. Because of that, we have reached out widely and contacted many potential partner organizations.
We have, for example, started cooperating with a folk high school that offers classes for senior citizens. We are going to give the students training and support in editing Wikipedia. We have established a partnership with a university where we are going to train both the educators, the researchers and the students so that they can review the quality of the content on Wikipedia and contribute to it over time. We have also started collaborating with regional libraries in two of the counties, to make it possible for public libraries to grow into hubs for Wikimedia activities. Local and regional museums, as well as Sweden's largest tourist organization, have also asked to be included.
As part of this, we have started some work to clarify Wikimedia Sverige's values, so that we can make our communication about who we are, what we do and what we stand for clearer. We believe this has created a strong framework for our efforts to increase our local visibility and recruit more members. We sent out survey to approximately 450 members, and received close to 100 responses. In the survey we asked questions about, for example, why our members are involved in Wikimedia Sverige, what issues they find important and what values we should focus on in the future. By far, democracy turned out to be the most crucial single issue; questions about transparency and education were also among the most important. We have published a summary of the survey results.
Additionally, we have worked on producing digital learning resources that we will be able to share with interested people, so that they can learn more about Wikimedia Sverige and start contributing to the Wikimedia platforms. When Wikimedia Foundation launched the educational platform Learn Wiki, we decided to join it instead of investing in an own platform for digital training. Now we can focus on filling the platform with content and building the planned course modules.
In 2023, we are going to, among other things, run local campaigns in social media, gather interested people to establish local communities and continue the work with more partner organizations.
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